The information assets of large organizations have traditionally been stored and managed on centralized computer systems. These centralized computer systems contain both raw information, such as accounting information, inventory information, and employee records, along with a suite of programs, including database management systems, that store, process, and retrieve the information assets. A large number of different hardware resources and software programs are used for managing the information assets, or data. For example, critical data must be backed up on multiply redundant, nonvolatile storage media. To manage this back-up task, an archiving system is generally run at regular time intervals to write out the data in a meaningful format to tapes or magnetic disks. As another example, database management systems may be employed to store, meaningfully categorize, and manipulate data within the computer system.
There are a great number of different alternatives and possibilities for managing the data for an organization. An organization may, for example, elect to make incremental tape backups of critical data on a monthly, daily, or even hourly basis, depending on the cost of the incremental backups versus the potential risks and associated costs of loosing cumulative data. As another example, database management systems support a virtually infinite number of ways to organize data within a computer system. An organization must therefore select a set of operating procedures and standards for defining the particular methods by which the organization has chosen to manage data within a computer system
The procedures and standards that control the management of computer data are generally stored in a large text-based document hierarchically organized into a number of levels of sections and subsections. FIG. 1 displays the first page of an example standards document. The example standards document of FIG. 1 contains standards for a document and billing control system, as indicated by the title of the document on the first line 101. Standards documents usually comprise many tens to hundreds of pages of text. In the example standards document of FIG. 1, the section heading 102 for section 1.1 indicates that section 1.1 relates to standards for developing new programs. A general description 103 follows the section heading 102. After the general description are more specific subsections on topics introduced in the general description, including a section on standards for proposals 104 and a section on standards for program design 105.
The text of a standards document may contain references to other sections within the document. Such references are indicated by a specific notation, for example, bracketing with "#" symbols 106 and 107 in the example standards document of FIG. 1. This type of reference is called an internal reference. The standards document may also contain references to various external sources of information. For example, the example standards document of FIG. 1 contains references to several commercial web pages 108 and 109 as well as a reference to a file available on the intranet. This type of reference is called an external reference. In addition to conforming to notational conventions for external and internal references 110, standards documents are written to conform to formatting conventions, including a numbering scheme for numbering sections, an indentation convention, and other conventions that specify the visual appearance of the standards document.
The standards document must itself be managed in some regular and intelligent fashion so that the standards document is made available to computer users and program developers and so that the standards document can be updated to reflect necessary changes and additions. The procedures and mechanisms for managing and disseminating the standards document is called an information technology standards management system ("ITSMS").
FIG. 2 displays a traditional manual ITSMS comprising a centralized computer system 201, an administrator's station 202, and computer user's stations 203. The standards document resides in a standards dataset stored on a nonvolatile storage device within the centralized computer system 204. This standards dataset, or portions thereof, is transmitted via 3270 terminal emulation and a subnetwork access protocol (SNA) link to the administrator's terminal 205 where it is displayed in an editable format. The administrator manually manages the standards document using keyboard input and terminal display. Information contained in the standards document, or portions thereof, is disseminated by the administrator to the various computer users and program developers via a separate e-mail system 206, printed documents 207, or by telephone 208. The administrator collects proposed changes and conducts discussions about the standards with computer users and program developers in a relatively ad hoc fashion using e-mail, printed documents, telephone conversations, and personal interviews and meetings. Various computer users and program developers may be designated as the owners of particular standards and may additionally be organized into a number of different committees that are responsible for discussing proposed changes and voting on them. The results of committee actions are returned to the standards administrator who then edits the displayed standards via keyboard entry to the terminal and causes the updated standards to be propagated back to the standards dataset stored on the centralized computer system.
The manual ITSMS displayed in FIG. 2 is inefficient and error prone. For example, the standards administrator may neglect to inform committee members of proposed standards changes or forget to poll committee members for their votes. Dissemination of the standards document via printed listings or e-mail incurs significant time delays since the standards administrator must manually extract, print, and disseminate portions of the standards document. The scheduling and transmission times related to in-person or telephone information exchanges is quite high. A need has therefore been recognized within the information technology departments of large organizations to automate ITSMS systems.